Movies

IMDB Age is a Greasemonkey script that I wrote to add age and other various info onto IMDB pages.

Here are my essential films. It’s somewhere between my favourite films and a list of films that must be seen. It’s in alphabetical order and I was originally aiming for the 50 mark, however there are too many good films so the current count is 83. The main table is generated from films.txt with getimdb.py (needs updating from MoinMoin to MD syntax). I’ve also cross-referenced this list with the Bechdel Test Movie List on a Essential Films Bechdel Test

There are only four types of film! For a while I (and possibly others) have been able to categorise all films into four different types. I can’t imagine coming up with such an idea. Perhaps I read it somewhere, or read it in relation stories and writing in general. However no one I have spoken to has heard of it and I’ve not been able to find out much about it. The classic example is the original Star Wars trilogy, A New Hope is “into and out of hole”, Empire is “into hole” and Jedi is “out of hole”.

I recently found out about the Bechdel Test, I was interested in how many of my Essential Films passed the test. So I used the Bechdel Test Movie List to cross-reference. I did some horrible HTML dumps and scripting to do this; after I finished I found out that they provide an API that can search based on IMDb ID. I currently have 79 films in my list; 64 have ratings listed, or 81% of them.

I love going to the cinema. I usually go once a week to my local Cineworld multiplex. Their website has changed a few times over the years. Generally the changes have all been improvements and my local cinema listing is good. However all cinema websites I have found lack an important view on the listings data. That is a chronological order rather than a film title order. Why is this useful you ask? Well if I want to go to the cinema on a particular evening I really don’t care what other films are showing outside my allocated timeslot. I want to be able to easily see which films are going to start say between 7 and 8 that I have not already seen.

I just found out that Cineworld have a public XML data source. It’s over in the syndication subdir of their main site. There are more technical details over on my CineworldScrape page. I feel a bit sad in a way, my scraper has been working for more or less 3 years now in some form or another. The annoying thing is that they don’t actually export all the data I use. Being quite visual I have grown used to using the thumbnails that each movie has to help me pick which films to see. Apart from this it’s a great step forward. However, the problem is there’s no knowing if Cineworld will pull this service or even if they want it public. For now I’ll continue to use my scraper.

I have finally documented CineworldScrape and made it available to the general public. So with any luck Google will index it!